Lost Ark, the popular MMORPG, will be designing its female characters to be less revealing. Well, at least in the west.
When Lost Ark was released for PC worldwide in 2022, it quickly became one of the most popular MMORPGs of its genre. In fact, it was so popular that its servers struggled to cope, which even resulted in a slight delay to fix the issues.
Lost Ark continues to be popular
At its peak, according to SteamDB, Lost Ark generated a whopping 1,325, 305 concurrent players. What’s more, at the time of writing, there are over 300,000 players exploring the game right now.
However, as much of a success as Lost Ark has been, it hasn’t been without controversy. In March 2022, developer Smilegate Games responded to concerns over its strict gender classes as well as sexualised costumes.
At the time, Smilegate told Eurogamer: “First let’s start with gender-locked classes. This is something that will roll out over time.
“Classes are tied pretty closely to their character models in terms of function and animation, so bringing opposite gender characters to a class takes more work than just making a differently gendered model available.”
Smilegate continued: “As for armour sets, while we aren’t altering any of the original costumes from the game, we are making adjustments so that the more revealing options won’t be front and centre in places like our marketing or the initial character creation screen”
“We are also including in some new outfit options that are not quite as revealing, but these are an addition and not a replacement.”
new characters will be less sexualised
As reported by Eurogamer, in a 2023 roadmap update revealed in December, a new character called “The Artist” will have less revealing costumes. However, this will only apply to Western audiences.
In the west, The Artist will wear shorts underneath her short skirts and her clothing length will also be adjusted. Moreover, adjustments made to female characters are said to be a “better fit for Western norms”.
That being said, original costumes will not be altered. It seems this will only apply to new character outfits. The 2023 roadmap said: “While our goal is to preserve the authenticity of the original game, we also work with Smilegate RPG to make localization updates to ensure the game feels approachable and representative of our Western players.”
Smilegate told Eurogamer in March 2022: “As for armour sets, while we aren’t altering any of the original costumes from the game, we are making adjustments so that the more revealing options won’t be front and centre in places like our marketing or the initial character creation screen (although the original character creator outfits are still available in-game as early drops).
“We are also including in some new outfit options that are not quite as revealing, but these are an addition and not a replacement.“
Are you happy with the changes for western audiences?
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Lost Ark is available for PC now with a console port being under consideration.
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Featured Image Credit: Amazon Games/Source: Eurogamer